Visitors’ preferences in terms of sustainable tourism applications: Pastoral Valley Ecological Life Farm example

Abstract

In this study, visitor preferences were investigated in Pastoral Valley Ecological Life Farm. This aims at finding answers to basic questions such as how the service quality can be improved and what kind of future investments should be made. The research data were collected from the questionnaires responded by the visitors staying at this ecologic farm and face-to-face interviews with the farm manager. Shapiro-Wilk-W test was applied to see if the data were parametrical and it was found that the data did not have normal distribution with confidence interval of 95%. Therefore, chi-square (χ2) test was used to explore the associations between the variables. The study findings revealed that people preferred staying at Pastoral Valley to go back to the past and have a vacation in the nature through specific activities such as integrating with rural life, improving handicraft skills at local cultural workshops, and engaging with the soil. These people are usually middle-aged individuals with a high education and income level and curious about local values and culture, live in big cities and want to go back to the nature. Moreover, these individuals think that it is important for the development of their children to learn about the nature and natural assets by experiencing on site.

Keywords

• sustainable tourism
• ecologic farms
• product diversification
• fethiye
• visitor profile
• pastoral valley
• fethiye
• sürdürülebilir turizm
• ekolojik çiftlikler
• ürün çeşitlendirme
• pastoral vadi
• fethiye
• ziyaretçi profili
• fethiye